Is a wood so hard that you wear out drill bits trying to drill through it. It also is heavy and would sit lower in the water increasing stability. I don't know if it was possible that Noah had access to wood like this.

That's not quite right. Ebony is hard but not that hard. I've worked ebony myself making scales for pocket knives and it works pretty easily. I also have a knife made for me by David Brodziak where the handle is make from Ebony.

So take that stuff about how hard it is with a grain of salt.

Also, Ebony doesn't grow in the area where Noah was building his boat and no signs of it every growing there have been found.

This wood, I think:hardwoodIs a wood so hard that you wear out drill bits trying to drill through it. It also is heavy and would sit lower in the water increasing stability. I don't know if it was possible that Noah had access to wood like this.

Think about this for one second would you...If it is so tough to work with today's modern wood working technology Noah would have had no chance.

That and for a craft the size of the ark the wood would have to be easy to work and in plentiful supply. Ebony is expensive because it isnâ€™t that common.

Then it wasn't Ebony, the name escapes me at the moment, I have a piece of it in my basement, but there is no name on it. It's as hard as a rock, but I think it comes from Africa, and Noah wouldn't have had access to it.

Wouldn't that depend on the wood being used?This wood, I think:hardwoodIs a wood so hard that you wear out drill bits trying to drill through it. It also is heavy and would sit lower in the water increasing stability. I don't know if it was possible that Noah had access to wood like this.

Boy, talk about completely missing the point!

Using the example of the Swedish warship Wasa, I built upon Jar's point about the largest wooden ships to show how the art of shipbuilding progressed through the slow accumulation of information garnered from experience from actually building and sailing ships. Knowledge about choice of materials is part of what derives from that experience. There was no such knowledge that Noah could have drawn upon for a ship the size of the Ark.

Let's say your special wood were available to Noah, and that it's the wood God commanded Noah to use (the Hebrew word for that wood used in the Bible is unknown today, according to an annotation in my NIV Bible). Given that Noah wasn't a shipbuilder or even a sailor, and given that ships of the period were mere boats with the longest maybe 20 or 30 feet, how would Noah know how to construct his boat to make it both seaworthy and structurally sound?

The history of shipbuilding says that the art progressed by experience, meaning that the tables of information about boats that were 100 feet long were extrapolated to construct boats that were 110 feet long. And then experience and information about 110 boats was used to construct boats that were 120 feet long. The question posed by the history of shipbuilding is how Noah constructed a sound and seaworthy boat that was 450 feet long without a pre-existing storehouse of information about boats that size.

I also saw a show where they took a model of the ark,...

The dimensions and details of the ark provided by God are pretty sparse. Did it have a prow? A rudder? A means for facing it into waves so it couldn't be tipped?

...and compared to a model of a super tanker, and put them through scale storms. The ark held up better than the supertanker, and would not roll, or sink.

The Wasa was 155 feet long, 38 feet wide and 172 feet high from keel to top of the main mast with 2 gun decks and 64 guns. How much like the actual Wasa do you think a model would be that was constructed from only that information? There are so many degrees of freedom that depended on the choices of the person building the model, it could end up very stable (for a warship) or very unstable. What would the testing of such a model tell them about the stability of the actual Wasa? Obviously, not a thing.

So given all the unknown design choices in the construction of the ark, what would lead anyone to believe that the results from the model tested had anything to do with the ark? And, of course, a tiny model has none of the soundness of construction issues.

Information about the hull is of course available from the existing references to Noahâ€™s Ark, and from the reasonable (common sense) assumptions of naval engineers.

And what "naval engineers" did Noah use?

For this purpose, 12 different hull forms with the same displacement were generated systemically by varying principal dimensions of the Ark.

As I said above, God's basic dimensions still leave an enormous amount unspecified. Do you really think Noah explored this design space just like AIG to arrive at the best final design?

Little is known about the shape and form of the Arkâ€™s hull. However, several explorers have each claimed that they have discovered the remains of the Ark at some sites on Mt. Ararat.8 Based on their arguments and references,9 we estimated the form of the Arkâ€™s hull as that of a barge-type ship.

Let me quote the first sentence again: "Little is known about the shape and form of the Arkâ€™s hull." Then AIG goes on to say they used the results from explorers who claim to have found remains of the ark to conclude it was a "barge-type ship". I won't go into the highly questionable nature of relying upon any information from the "search for Noah's Ark" community.

The article even includes equations like these:

A little beyond Noah, don't you think?

Basically all they did was take the information from the Bible to design the best Ark they could using modern knowledge. If such a wooden boat were even possible, highly questionable given that no wooden boat of that size has ever been constructed, Noah would have had no idea how to build it unless he had all the necessary details from God, because there is no way he could have had them himself because they simply didn't exist at the time. And, of course, here in the science forums we don't entertain "Goddidit" arguments.

Moving on to the end of your post:

Also, Noah's ark had no heavy guns, and may not have been top heavy at all with the heavier animals in the bottom.

Of course the ark had no heavy guns. That wasn't the point. The point was how the art of shipbuilding progressed one small step at a time, incorporating what was learned from existing boats into new ones. You can't just skip from building a 100 foot boot to a 200 foot boat. You first have to have information from the experiences of those who have built the 110 foot boat, the 120 foot boat, etc.

A science-based approach seeks evidence. This thread is at heart very speculative because it is exploring whether a type of ship for which there is no evidence and for which we have only the sparsest of details could have floated for a year on a violent sea while full of animals. A consideration of this question based upon evidence indicates it is unlikely in the extreme. God may have just told Noah everything he needed to know, implying that what made it into the Bible is just an outline, but "Goddidit" arguments aren't permitted in the science forums.

6:15 And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.

6:16 A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it.

A major problem with large wooden ships is that they snake and hog as you can read Here. These shape changes are unavoidable with any wave action at all and the tendency of a beam to flex increases with the cube of its length. Large wooded ships like the Wyoming required constant pumping. The ark would spring leaks all over, pitch or no pitch.

It seems to me that just about the worst thing you could do under these circumstances is put a door in the side of the boat. It just gives you an additional place for the ark to spring leaks and will really undermine the stability of that side.

You also have a boat with no steerage drifting around in global rainstorm for 40 days and nights. Enough water would come in the window to sink the ark nearly as fast as it would sink from leaking at the seams. Remember that even a mere thousand feet of global rain requires it to rain a foot an hour the entire time.

... true BUT the neutrients will have been wash out and disolved into the water , so are much more likely to end up in the oceans / seas /lake post flood that on the land , ...

So we should find fossils of land animals in the deep ocean eh?

...and the poo packed down as new ballast to store until needed .

I had this comment from a friend on another site:

(best reason for the impossibility of the ark: after two days, any attempt to light a lamp would ignite the methane produced by animal flatulence, and blow the ark out of the water like HMS Hood taking a broadside from the Bismarck . But I digress).

*******Wasn`t pitch derived from the effects of rotting vegetation which was deposited in the sediments DURING the Flood? Maybe Noah sent an advance order and God delivered?

No, This manufactured glue (pitch) was expressÂ­ly produced for the lamination of wood and was well-known throughout the ancient world. There are many examples of how pitch was used by the ancients. In the ancient Roman Empire boiling birch bark and extracting the resins yielded a glue-like tar.

****source noted below

Laminated or Layered Wood

This atonement scenario and the similariÂ­ties between the Hebrew words in Genesis 6:14 seem to indicate that the word gopher and gopherwood are closely related to the word for pitch. In other words, the word gopherÂ­wood is not a type of wood but a wood process. Specifically the process of using pitch or bitumen combined with wood. It has often been assumed that the pitch process applied to the wood may have been only on the sides, that is the inside surface and the outside surface of the ark. In actuality, the pitch process would have been internal as well as external. Since atonement must take place not only in the outward actions of a person but also in the heart, the analogy would be complete with gopherwood having an internal coating of pitch.

Interestingly, older dictionaries (Note [13]) will provide insight into the word gopher. The words wafer, gauffer, goffer, and gopher, all deal with related concepts. Definitions include: layers in a wafer, layers glued together, an adhesive to glue together layers of paper, and layers of lace in womenâ€™s clothing. The concept of layering and lamination is implied in all of these words. The term, â€œgoffering,â€ comes from an old French word which is the process whereby irons are used to flute and press together various layers of lace. The early French setÂ­tlers in the United States named rodents that burrowed in the earth and created layers of honeycomb [tunnels] â€” gophers.

The Bible reveals that Noahâ€™s Ark was covered inside and outside by pitch. This would serve as a waterproofing agent. This pitch covering was probably natural bitumen that was commonly found in seepages in the Middle East. But what many people do not realize is that the arkâ€™s design would also include laminated or layered wood that was glued together with a resinous tar-like coating. This manufactured glue was expressÂ­ly produced for the lamination of wood and was well-known throughout the ancient world. This lamination would provide strength for the large beams required for the construction of the ark. As shown gopherÂ­wood was actually a process in which the arkâ€™s wood was laminated and glued together with pitch and resin, a type of ancient plywood. â€” by Arnold C. Mendez, Sr.

This pitch covering was probably natural bitumen that was commonly found in seepages in the Middle East.

Yeah. Bitumen, the tarry fractions of petroleum found in seepages from rocks in the Middle East. Petroleum from living material that drowned in the Flood in rocks from sediments that were all buried by the Flood. Which hadn't happened yet.

Why isn't that real convincing?

And why are we worried here about the etymology of the English word "gopher" when Genesis was written down in Hebrew a millenium and a half before the English or Old French languages existed?

Thanks for that, John. Having built a few sea-craft for use in a rough sea, one thing you soon learn is not to glue stressed timber with rigid adhesives. It will either separate along the glue lines, or split the timber next to the glued section. So is the tree resin a rigid glue, or does it have a degree of flexibility? Pitch tends to be brittle over time, so maybe Noah had a secret recipe. Laminations are extremely difficult unless the sections are mated closely. Would Noah and Co. have the ability to plane sections to that degree of fit?